Imagine that when you looked into the Internet bank, you found two currencies on your account instead of one: 20,000 rubles were added to 20,000 rubles. At the same time, the rates of both currencies to the dollar fell in such a way that in sum you remained "with your own". Approximately it was experienced the day before by all owners of digital wallets with crypto currency bitcoin.
Hardrock ("hard branching") - this is the change in the crypto currency code in the code, when a part of the nodes that provide the work of the block system starts to calculate the blocks according to the new rules, as a result of which the updated nodes can no longer check the blocks created by the updated nodes.
What happened to bitcoin?
Hardcore bitcoin - on the eve of the crypto currency split into two versions, Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash - was due to the fact that it was very difficult to "live the old way" with the popularity of digital money: transactions in the block-network were slower, and commissions for them (in fact, the "fee" to the miners for including this transaction in the nearest computed block) grew.
Once upon a time, in order for the transaction to be recorded in another block of blockage - and, thus, was confirmed in the system forever, you had to wait about ten minutes, but in recent months you often had to wait for the block to end for hours, if not for days. You could solve these problems by increasing the maximum block size, which when Bitcoin was created in 2008 was limited to 1 megabyte.
The last two years in the crypto-currency community there was literally a "civil war" between two camps that see the future of Bitcoin in different ways. Some, "traditionalists", consider the crypto currency as a digital analog of gold. From their point of view, the main advantages of bitcoins - security, independence from states and financial institutions and the inability to "replay" the transaction, and not the speed and cheapness of making transactions.
What is Bitcoin Cash?
"Progressives", whose efforts and appeared yesterday Bitcoin Cash, adhere to a different point of view. In their opinion, bitcoins are destined to replace cash around the world, they want to buy coffee and pizza at the store without crypto money and banking systems - and, therefore, transactions should be made instantly and with a minimum commission. The only way to achieve this, without removing the operation beyond the limits of the block system, is to increase the block size. In Bitcoin Cash it is 8 megabytes.
The majority in the bitcoin community supported a less radical step. The solution, called Segwit2x, which in the future allows to increase the block size from 1 MB to 2 MB, has recently been gradually introduced at the compute nodes of the blockade bitcoin. Those same miners who supported a different point of view installed other software on their systems and began to "calculate" Bitcoin Cash.
The new version of the crypto currency was supported not only by the miners who reoriented part of their capacities to it, but also many exchange systems, as well as purse developers. Therefore, it can be used almost with the same convenience as conventional bitcoins.
What happens to the Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash courses?
Since there are many supporters of "fast and cheap" bitcoins, most likely, in the future both new crypto-currencies will remain. Although the split did not go smoothly - many exchanges suspended currency exchange, and the Bitcoin Cash rate jumped by tens of percent. Interest in "alternative" bitcoins is quite large - many are willing to risk investing in the "cash of the future" counting on their success.
The rate of the "main" bitcoine at the time of "hardfork" fell from about $ 2,900 to $ 2,700, the last hours before writing this material, the currency is traded in the corridor $ 2,700 - $ 2,750. Bitcoin Cash cost about $ 300 in the first few hours of Tuesday, but since then it managed to drop to almost 200, soaring to almost 450, and by now it's about $ 400. That is, as a result of all the hard-won, instead of each costing 2,900 dollars bitcoin, everyone now has bitcoin for 2,700 and bitcoin cache for 400, total 3100. At the same time, the capitalization-that is, the total dollar cost-of the "alternative" bitcoin is now about 6.6 billion dollars, and "core" - 44.9 billion
(data of CoinMarketCap).
It is unlikely that anyone now will undertake to predict the dynamics of the courses of each of the new crypto-currencies. Moreover, hardfocus created a dangerous precedent, and after a split, new ones may follow, if the bitcoin community is deprived of a single regulator, it will not be possible to agree on the future development of crypto currency technologies.